Lowdown Dirty
Page 31
“Well, let’s confer,” he said, trying to keep his tone neutral.
That was hard as hell. After all, the future he wanted hinged on a conversation he hadn’t even heard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“The deal sounds too good to be true,” Valerie whispered when Tim bent down. “Tell me it isn’t.”
Heidi tapped Tim on the shoulder and pointed to the deli’s meat case. “What does he even eat anymore? Does he still like pastrami?”
“Salami,” Valerie said.
Heidi pointed at her. “That’s what it was. We need to conference and tell me everything you know about him.” She put in an order for a sandwich for Kevin. “I was always so pissed when my teachers told my parents stuff about me that they wouldn’t have found out, but I’m not beneath using those tactics myself now.”
“Funny how experience changes folks,” Tim said. He moved into Heidi’s vacated space in line and put in an order for both him and Valerie. He hadn’t asked, but she didn’t really care. At the moment, she was happy to let someone else make simple decisions for her so she could use her brain energy on bigger ones.
Her new boss Shel Thomas was a viper and was totally unapologetic about it. “I don’t care if men think I’m a bitch,” she’d said. “If I’ve got something they want and it’s one of a kind, I’m gonna make them pay.”
The thing was Valerie, and Shel was going to make Lipton pay.
Her on-the-fly, take-it-or-leave-it proposal to Richard Lipton had been to contract Valerie out to them for the duration of the Shora project for an exorbitant sum of money well over commensurate for her worth, which would put some unexpected money in Shel’s pocket, too.
Shel would have final say over Valerie’s plans and her firm would be the one on record, but Valerie would get to remain on site at Shora in the same capacity she had before…just with a bit more autonomy.
It was a perfect solution. It seemed too perfect. That’s why Valerie had told Shel she’d call her back. There had to be some pitfall Valerie couldn’t see.
She must have zoned out staring at the deli meats because Tim gave her a nudge and got her moving.
“Came on,” he said. “We don’t have to wait here for the sandwiches. They’ll bring them out to us.”
“Oh.” She followed him to a table near the window.
Heidi sat in the corner and muttered while she dug in her purse, saying something about her reading glasses walking away.
Valerie slipped between the seats to the one across from Heidi, and Tim sat beside Valerie.
She picked up the saltshaker and fiddled with it, stared at the holes on the top. Counted them. There were twelve.
Tim gave her knee a squeeze under the table. “Wanna talk about it?”
“I don’t know what there is to say. I feel like I’m in this gauzy dreamland and any minute I’m going to wake up and I’ll realize it was all phony and that I can’t really have everything I want.”
Heidi pushed her garishly patterned yellow-framed glasses onto her nose and dragged her thumb up her phone screen. “You’re making it sound like it was some easy thing. It wasn’t, from what I hear.”
“You got that offer because you pushed for it,” Tim said.
“The job, maybe, but…” Valerie cut her gaze to Heidi and then back to Tim. It didn’t matter if Heidi overheard. She’d likely get it all second- or third-hand, anyway, given the robustness of the grapevine out at Clay’s. “I was going to give you up.”
“You weren’t giving me up so much as doing what you told me you were going to. You said from the start that you couldn’t commit. If anyone has had things fall too easily into place, it’s me. I’m benefitting from your good fortune.”
“Okay, maybe. But say I accept Shel’s terms at stay on at Shora. That’s three years, maybe four, of development. What next? I don’t start things I know I’m not going to finish, and—”
He silenced her with a kiss.
Going limp against the arm he’d slung around her, she understood. “Try another excuse,” he seemed to be saying.
She didn’t have any excuses.
She slumped in her seat and tried to reorder her thoughts. Why couldn’t she just let him have her? It was an easy thing. She didn’t even have to beg.
“Who knows what’s going to happen three or four years from now?” Heidi asked. “If you’d been in San Francisco, you might have been considering making a move back this way by then.”
“That’s true,” Valerie murmured. “My grandmother’s getting up there in years.”
“Don’t get so hung up in what the future might be that you don’t make yourself happy in the interim. That’s why it took Tim and I so long to get divorced.”
Tim squeezed Valerie’s knee again. “If you’re concerned, ask Shel what she sees happening in a few years. Maybe she’ll surprise you.”
“Why are you so patient with me?”
He shrugged and leaned back for Maria Lucia to slide a sandwich in front of him.
Valerie looked down at her own sandwich, the same kind she’d had on the day she’d met with Nikki Paulsen. Nikki was a negotiator. She did that for a living, and it carried over to her personal life, too. She was used to asking for what she wanted. She’d told Valerie that the first step in getting what she wanted was figuring out that was.
Valerie’s career was important to her, and she was happy with the possibilities offered to her. Her little family was important, as was being near enough to them to render aid in case of rare emergency.
But what she’d been neglecting for a lot of years was that she was important, too. She had to feed both her happiness and her future, and Tim had been trying to have a part in both of those things.
She gripped his hand tightly and raised her gaze to his curious one. “Timmy, I want everything.”
“Are you asking me to give you that house key back?”
She laughed and picked up her sandwich. “Your house is cramped. I’d be better off staying in Shora.”
“You said you were going to fix my house. That’s not fair.”
“I will fix it.” She took a bite of her sandwich and stared at the layers of meat, cheese, and vegetables. Damn, that’s good. Tim had picked well. She swallowed, and said, “You know, there’s a space off the back corner of the master bedroom nearest the river that can be pushed out along with that tiny bathroom. You could turn it into a walk-in closet.”
“I know which wall you’re talking about. That’d be a pretty big space.”
She shrugged. “More space for my steel-toed boots.” She gave the sandwich a turn and took another big bite. “I mean after we’re done using it as a nursery. Convertible spaces are kind of my thing.”
“Yay, office baby!” Heidi said softly.
Valerie raised an eyebrow at that inscrutable statement and looked at Tim, who was just grinning.
“I should…probably show you those plans soon, huh? Takes a long time to make things happen.”
“I think you should show them to me right now.”
“I can’t. I gotta go back to work.”
“Bring them over later, then. I’ll give you back the key, and maybe you can help me practice installing some things.”
Heidi seemed to get the crude reference well before Valerie did. “Tim!”
“Whatever,” he murmured. “You’re used to it.”
“Don’t scare the poor woman. You haven’t even dragged her down the aisle yet.”
Valerie laughed again and fixed her gaze on the world outside the window. Her new world. She’d never really taken the time to appreciate it because she hadn’t wanted to get attached, but now she craved it—having a connection to a place…to someone.
She wouldn’t give up on her quest to have it all and didn’t care how long her gig in Shora lasted. When it ended, she’d be like Nikki and keep looking for ways to get everything she wanted. She’d have to be creative.
She was an architect. She was good at being creati
ve.
“I don’t need an aisle,” Valerie said. “Just someone to say the words and maybe a bottle of champagne right after.”
“We can do it on my boat this weekend, then,” Tim said, twirling his fingers around an escaped wisp of Valerie’s hair. “And then sail off to…wherever.”
That sounded amazing. Having a plan. Knowing what came next.
Being his. Loving him.
“Okay,” she said. “This weekend.”
“Hold on a damn minute.” Heidi furrowed her brow. “Did you just plan a wedding in front of me?”
“I…think we did?” Valerie said, wondering.
Tim wrapped up his sandwich and pushed back his chair. Then he grabbed Valerie’s hand and her to her feet. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’ve got some paperwork to do. I’m not letting you change your mind. If I’m going to fly my parents up here—”
She grabbed her sandwich before he could make her abandon it. “I’m not going to change my mind! I’m staying, Timmy. Forever. I love you. I’m going to make this work.”
He pulled her against his chest and tipped her chin up so she’d meet his stern gaze. “You sure?”
“So sure. It feels right.”
“And you love me.”
“And I love you.”
“Woman, you’d better.”
“Would you happen to like to tell me that love me, too, or are you just marrying me because you like the way I look in stockings?”
The laugh lines at the corners of his deepened as his eyes narrowed in mirth. “I wouldn’t like the stockings so much if I didn’t love the woman wearing them. You drive me to distraction, woman, I swear you do.”
“I hear that condition is contagious.”
“You sure you don’t have time to run a couple of errands before you go back to work?” His palms slipped down her back to her ass, which he groped indiscreetly.
She let out a nervous laugh and glanced behind her. Most folks in the deli were trying to mind their own business. Heidi, of course, leered and grinned saucily.
Valerie cleared her throat and pushed up onto her tiptoes. She whispered, “Maybe a short errand in the back of your truck?”
“Mmm. I know exactly where to park.” He started pulling her to the door, and called out to Heidi, “Be back in a bit. Need to run an errand with my fiancée.”
“I can’t believe I’m someone’s fiancée,” Valerie said as he pulled her outside.
“Don’t get used to the feeling, pretty girl. It won’t last long.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I’ll let you in on a little secret. Lowdown Dirty is a story that I’ve been holding onto for a few years. I wrote it for a specific publisher, but it didn’t quite fit the line, so I figuratively sat on it, intending to publish it later when I had a schedule gap.
Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans.
I got pulled into the quicksand that is writing paranormal romance series (Desert Guards and Masters of Maria!) and had to press the pause button on contemporary and erotic contemporary romances.
Because I’ve been spending much of this year re-releasing a chunk of my backlist, I decided it’d be a perfect time to sneak out Lowdown Dirty, too. Be on the lookout for news about what’s up with Leah and Heidi in the future. (Naturally, I’ve got a few paranormal romances to put out first.)
If you subscribe to my contemporary romance newsletter, you’ll be one of the first to know what’s new in the Holley Trent universe.
Also, special thanks to my former Den of Sin series co-authors LV Lewis and Ambrielle Kirk for being my spare brains for this story during the drafting process.
ALSO BY HOLLEY TRENT
THE PLOT TWIST MINISERIES
Writing Her In
Three Part Harmony
REEDSVILLE ROOSTERS
Winterball
One in Waiting
Lucky Strike
Designated Hitter
Out of Bounds
DEN OF SIN
Ménage à Troys
As Sweet
O for Two
Three Strikes
Shame and a Disgrace
Off the Hook
COPYRIGHT AND CREDITS
LOWDOWN DIRTY
First Edition
Copyright © 2019 by Holley Trent
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Cover stock:
© Kamil Majdański via 123RF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.